Naomi Hirahara - Gasa-Gasa Girl

They went down a hallway and then entered a brightly lit, airy room. A banner reading Seabrook USA hung from the ceiling. Familiar Seabrook Farms labels had been framed and placed on the walls. Mas headed straight for a diorama of the entire operation, which included a water tower and a factory marked by a long chimney. This Seabrook had once been quite an operation. Mas had seen his share of rice paddies in Hiroshima, lettuce fields in Watsonville, and rows of tomato plants in various towns in Texas. This Seabrook made all of those farms look like someone’s backyard vegetable garden.

“Hey, Mari,” said a young Sansei man in a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. His hair was all shaved off like an obosan at a Buddhist temple. The rest of him looked strong and healthy, the type to be hiking in the hills, not hiding in the basement in a small town called Seabrook. He walked around a counter and gave Mari a quick hug. “Haven’t seen you in ages.”

“About five years.” Mari’s face seemed flushed, as if she had been in an onsen, a hot-spring bath. “This is Tug Yamada, and my dad, Mas Arai. Kevin Tachibana.”

Kevin had a firm grip, and Mas was surprised to feel that his hand was callused.

“You a farmer?” Mas couldn’t help but blurt out.

“Dad!” Mari said. “He’s a professor.”

“No, it’s quite all right. I’ve bought an old house outside of Philly. Been renovating it myself. I guess I have some home-improvement battle scars.” He grinned, and Mas took a liking to him instantly. A Sansei, smart, and even worked with his hands on his own house. Why couldn’t Mari have fallen for a man like this?

“So you’re the boss today,” Mari said.

“Well, it’s my spring break. I’m just filling in while the director’s on vacation.” Kevin looked at Mari’s left hand. “Well, how are you? Married, I see.”

Mari, thankfully, did not have a matching tattoo ring, but a simple silver one instead.

“Yeah,” Mari said. “And one baby.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Three months old.” Mari’s eyes grew watery.

“Wow. I guess you’ll want to get back to your baby ASAP. So, let’s see-you’re doing research on Kazzy Ouchi, right?”

Mari nodded. “You mentioned that Kazzy had contacted you about six months ago.”

“Well, since I’m doing my research on prewar Nisei in New York and New Jersey, he wanted to meet with me. He specifically wanted to know about this Asa Sumi.”

“Yes, the mother of Seiko Sumi, right?”

“Yeah, Seiko lives up in Fort Lee. Really nice woman. Have you met her?”

Mari nodded.

Mas noticed small beads of perspiration on his daughter’s nose. Whenever she was caught in a lie or a tight situation, her nose would begin to sweat.

“Well, anyway, apparently Seiko’s mother had worked as a housekeeper over in the Waxley House back in the thirties. I guess she worked under Kazzy’s mother, Emily, and even filled in when Emily was pregnant. During the war, Asa was over here, in Seabrook, so I guess he wondered if we had any information.”

“Did you?”

“Well, Seiko had showed us a journal.”

“Yes,” Mari murmured. Mas also remembered some sort of diary on display in the high-rise apartment.

“She didn’t give to us, of course, but did leave some sample pages. She wanted to know if we could translate it for her or at least find someone who could. Unfortunately, I can’t read kanji, only some katakana and hiragana, you know? My Japanese is terrible; I took Italian for my PhD. For a while I was introducing myself as Tachibana- san to visiting scholars, until I found out that no Japanese puts ‘ san ’ after their own name.”

Mas wasn’t surprised about the young man’s inability to speak Japanese. He was third-generation, after all. Even a Nisei like Tug didn’t know much. The World War II camps and racism in general had made the Japanese lose their language. Why try to retain it if it was just one more thing that the government and people would hold against them?

Mari apparently felt that way. “But we’re not Japanese. We’re American,” she said.

“That’s true.” Kevin laughed. “Maybe it was my subconscious, attempting to assert its Americanness, huh? Anyway, I couldn’t read the thing. Neither could most of the staff. But we are planning to apply for a grant to do the translation. Seiko couldn’t afford it otherwise; she’s a retired nurse and also a perfectionist. Her Japanese is limited to a few phrases she learned from her parents. Simple stuff that I also remember hearing from my grandparents. But no writing or reading of kanji. Seiko wanted it professionally done. She told us that she would keep the original for now, but that we could have access to the journal anytime we wanted.”

“Do you have the sample pages?”

“Oh, yeah, I dug them out for you. I have it in the back. Hold on a second.” He disappeared through a door to a storage area.

Meanwhile, Tug had wandered to a photo exhibit of Seabrook, and Mas joined him. One photo had a line of women, their heads covered with white caps like the ones nurses used to wear, sorting vegetables on a conveyor belt. Men and teenagers picking beans. Nisei singles dancing, twists of crepe paper overhead.

Tug pointed to a black-and-white photo of girls, both Nisei and hakujin, standing together in Girl Scout uniforms. “Kind of like a mini United Nations. Jamaicans. Hakujin escaping the Dust Bowl.”

Mas stared at an image of a line of hakujin women wearing headbands and long, flowing dresses with geometric patterns. “Theysu Americans?” Mas asked.

Tug examined the photo in front of Mas. “Oh, no. There were a lot of Estonians who were here. Their country was over by Russia. The Soviets occupied them, then the Germans, then the Soviets again. Some escaped to come here in fishing boats.”

“ Hakujin boat people?” Mas was surprised. People were running away from their troubles any way they could. It didn’t matter if you were black, Asian, Latino, or even hakujin. “Dat Anna Grady not American. Sheezu come from somewhere else.”

“Maybe she’s Estonian.”

Mas nodded, and Tug took out his notebook from his pocket and jotted some notes. Health inspector turned detective, Tug took on his new role with relish.

Kevin finally returned to the counter with some papers in hand. Tug and Mas could overhear him and Mari struggle with the Japanese.

“Let’s see, hmm, well, this is the date, right? Damn, the year’s written by era. What are they again?” asked Mari.

“Meiji, Taisho, Showa,” Kevin recited. “Showa is during Emperor Hirohito’s reign. Starts around 1926, I think.”

Mari held a page close to her face. “These are the characters for Showa. How does it work again? The year in which the era begins minus one plus the number that follows the era?”

“Confusing.”

“I know,” said Mari. “It’s just like when babies are born in Japan; they come out a year old already. We had a heck of a time figuring out what year my grandmother was born after she died.”

“Dad”-Mari finally called over Mas-“can you help us with this?”

Mas got out his reading glasses, not that eager to serve as a linguist. He looked at Tug, Mari, and then Kevin. If Mas was the most literate one of them all, they were in deep trouble.

The pages were written in a woman’s fine script. She must have had some kind of education, because the strokes from her pen were definite and crisp. Each sentence ran straight from the top to the bottom without the aid of lined paper.

“Youzu start off here,” Mas told Mari and Kevin, pointing to the far right side.

“Dad, that much we know. What does it say?”

“Novemba sixteen, letsu see, 1930. Kumori, gray day. Ame, rain. Go buysu beef from whatchacallit-”